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"He's on me a lot," D.J. Fluker said. "He's on me a lot because he sees the potential in me."

The Chargers first-round pick is learning on the fly this offseason, recently concluding the 10-practice organized team activities (OTAs) phase while working with the first-team unit. The next step for the right tackle is a three-day mandatory minicamp that begins Tuesday.

So, how is Fluker looking? That usually evokes a two-part answer at ground level.

The first part: He is a rookie.

"He's like any rookie," coach Mike McCoy said. "There's going to be some good and some bad to anything he does. You take the good with the bad. He's learning. It's like all rookies. They're learning a new system."

The second part: If Fluker maintains this effort, he ought to be just fine.

In June, the No. 11 overall pick naturally isn't where he'd need to be if this was September, and he knows that. He said he must improve his pass sets while keeping better pace with things as they develop around him.

A busy mind can slow the body with too much thinking and not enough reacting. While the 22-year-old has been learning the playbook and watching film on his own, he looks to study more tape with D'Alessandris in the room, hoping the coach's presence will expedite the learning process.

"If I had a grade, I'm still a C student right now — I'd give myself a C-plus," Fluker said. "But I'm still learning, and each time and each day, my understanding gets a whole lot better. My grade is going up."

Fluker's strengths as a three-year starter at Alabama have been his early strengths in San Diego .

At 6-foot-5 and 339 pounds, he is a mauler. His natural dominance in the run game is partly why some teams, before the draft, projected Fluker as better suited to play right guard in the NFL. There are no such immediate plans for that here — "we're playing him where we're playing him," McCoy said — but Fluker projects as an asset to a run game that averaged 3.6 yards per carry last year, second lowest in the NFL.

Fluker has a fan in Corey Liuget.

The defensive end said, in his three years in the league, he hasn't seen a rookie with his vocal leadership.

"That guy, he gets me going," Liuget said. "He gets me excited to come to work every day. ... He's very physical. When you look at him, when he ties his shirt up sometimes, I'll be like, 'Man, that's a big boy.'

"I know for a fact once he grabs you, it's over. If he can't touch you, he's going to work on it and try to get you next time. He's definitely working to get better each and every day."

Fluker finds reward in his efforts.

The game still feels fast to him. But over the month he's been here, it has slowed some.

"It'll come," Fluker said. "All I need is to keep putting the time in to learn more and more. Each play I run, I'm going to make sure I don't mess up on that same play twice or three times in a row. After that, it starts clicking. Sometimes, plays click automatically when they're communicating on the line, and I get it. Now, I'm a whole lot faster. It's been coming and going, and one day, it's going to click.